Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature

By Charles Baxter

Searching and erudite new essays on writing from the author of Burning Down the House.

Charles Baxter’s new collection of essays, Wonderlands, joins his other works of nonfiction, Burning Down the House and The Art of Subtext. In the mold of those books, Baxter shares years of wisdom and reflection on what makes fiction work, including essays that were first given as craft talks at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

The essays here range from brilliant thinking on the nature of wonderlands in the fiction of Haruki Murakami and other fabulist writers, to how request moments function in a story. Baxter is equally at home tackling a thorny matter such as charisma (which intersects with political figures like the disastrous forty-fifth US president) as he is bringing new interest to subjects such as list-making in fiction.

Amid these craft essays, an interlude of two personal essays—the story of a horrifying car crash and an introspective “letter to a young poet”—add to the intimate nature of the book. The final essay reflects on a lifetime of writing, and closes with a memorable image of Baxter as a boy, waiting at the window for a parent who never arrives and filling that absence with stories. Wonderlands will stand alongside his prior work as an insightful and lasting work of criticism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jul 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781644451793

Charles Baxter

Charles Baxter lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and teaches at the University of Michigan. He is the author of six previous works of fiction, including ‘Believers, Harmony of the World’ and ‘Through the Safety Net’. ‘The Feast of Love’, published by Fourth Estate in 2001, was shortlisted for the National Book Award.

Book preview

Preface

What I offer in this book is a set of essays about features in narratives that have had an obsessive grip on me: requests and lists; and hauntings; toxic subject matter and Hell; dreams and urgent narratives; and images. These topics do not yield up a set of suggestions and pieces of practical advice, although now and then, as in the Captain Happen essay, the writing may stray into that territory. I apologize for any inconsistencies, of which there are several in these pages. The essays are often subjective and autobiographical. My parents (especially my mother), my siblings, my friends and loved ones are here, and sometimes they speak up.

Years ago, when I was in graduate school, one of my teachers was asked what he wanted in the final term paper he had assigned. Try to be interesting, he said to us with a smile. In that spirit, I have done my best in these essays to be interesting and to be as courageous as I could be in uniting the personal and impersonal, the subjective and the objective.

As I write, we have recently passed through a presidential election. The candidate who lost, Donald Trump, claimed that he did not lose, that he could not have lost. Such a thought was impermissible: it did not square with his view of himself, and as a fact, and a thought, it had to be rejected and exiled to that place—a kind of psychic sub-basement where unthinkable thoughts reside. Donald Trump does not write stories, poems, or novels. But his refusal to concede the presidential election derives from a narrative that was toxic to him—namely, that he had lost and was a loser. In this book you will find an essay on toxic narratives. That essay does not exactly explain Donald Trump’s behavior and it does not exactly explain how to write a toxic narrative. But it does its best to give an account of what an unthinkable thought is, and what its contradictory elements may contain, and why unthinkable thoughts often produce stories.

All the stories we tell each other are hybridized: parts of them come from the real world (scare quotes attached) and parts of them come from somewhere else, a place I have called Wonderland, very close to the land of possibility and the land of dreams. In front of every story and novel and poem, there is a WELCOME mat. You step on the mat as you enter. Once you’re in, you’re somewhere else.

Welcome.

WONDERLANDS

The Request Moment, or There’s Something I Want You to Do

My uncle, a combat veteran of World War II, once told me that when he was a little boy, he had been bossed around by his older sister. Every day from morning until night, she would say to him, There’s something I want you to do. He would scurry through the house doing the various chores she had requested. When he asked her why he should follow her orders, she replied, "If you do what I ask, I won’t get mad at you. That’s your reward."

Sometimes family members act as if they were gods. They can enforce their own laws. If you don’t do what they ask, you get punished. The hierarchy of enforcement in both families and society at large runs from the modest suggestion to the more urgent request, to the military order, and at last to the Supreme Authority’s decree. The level of enforcement is in proportion to the intensity of the demand and the power available to the authority for a punishment if the demand isn’t followed. If you don’t follow a suggestion, you don’t get punished (it’s only a suggestion, after all). If you ignore or disobey a command, hell may await you.

Suppose that when you were a pre-teen, or a teenager, one of your friends dared you to do something. Let’s get drunk and steal your dad’s car! I dare you. Someone daring someone else is a classic and solid basis of many stories, mostly because the dare may involve a dangerous or criminal action, and partly because the objects of the dare are having their courage tested. More than that, they are having their character challenged and defined.

When I first started writing short stories, I would show them to a friend of mine whom I will call Duffy. Away from books, he was fun to be around, but confronted with the printed word, he lapsed into brutality. He had a mean streak. He also fancied himself a writer, as I did. We thought we had to toughen each other up in preparation for what the world would do to us, so we pronounced the harshest judgments on our stories that we could think up. Brutal criticism can be helpful if you can stand to listen to it and not become depressed or enraged. Duffy looked like a hippie, smoked a lot of weed, and had hair down to his shoulders, but as a critic he enjoyed being abusive. Literature had seduced and betrayed him. For him, literature was the scene of an ongoing crime that had been perpetrated in silence and secrecy against him.

One time in a greasy spoon he returned one of my stories to me. The pages had been marked up and bloodied with red ink, and there were some very creepy-looking stains on them. I asked Duffy what he thought of my story. Well, he said, "the sentences are okay, I guess. But the story just sort of sits there. Whaddya mean? I asked. I thought my story was pretty good and that Duffy was lost in a stoner haze. Just what I said, he told me. Your story just sits there. Nothing happens. He gave me a probing look. His eyes were bloodshot, with capillaries like tiny trails to his brain. You know, Baxter, he said, nobody in your stories ever takes action against bad guys, and nobody ever asks anybody for anything. Why’s that? You scared of something? What kind of a world do you live in? Do people just give you stuff? He gave me a smug, drug-infused smile. Me, I live in the grip of necessity."

Necessity was a word that Marxists liked to deploy in those days. But Duffy had his nerve, using that word on me. No, people did not just give me stuff, but I felt like murdering him for not liking my fiction. That felt like a necessity. In hindsight, I recognize that he was doing me a favor by talking about necessity, the force that leans on characters to do what they do.

The years pass; the calendar pages fall from the wall. The scene changes, and I’m sitting in the audience at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis watching a production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. One of the first features I notice about the play this time is that almost as soon as Macbeth is reunited with Lady Macbeth in act one, she begins issuing requests, or orders, to him in the imperative mode: To beguile the time, she says, Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye, / Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower, / But be the serpent under ’t. This is neither advice nor a suggestion. She’s telling her husband what he should do: commit a murder. For the sake of his own ambitions, he must murder Duncan, but first he must act hospitable when Duncan arrives as a houseguest. When Macbeth quails at the prospect of murdering Duncan, Lady Macbeth informs him that if he were a real man, he’d do it. The act constitutes the proof of manhood. But screw your courage to the sticking-place, / And we’ll not fail, she instructs him, noting, by using we, that they’re in this together. At this point in the play, Macbeth’s worries about being judged a weakling by his wife are worse than his worries about being a murderer.

I dare you.

Macbeth begins with prophecy by the weird sisters and a request moment from Lady Macbeth, and both drive the play forward. A month or so later, by coincidence, I happened to be watching another Shakespeare production, this time of Hamlet, when in the first act something clicked and I sat up. When the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears in act one, scene five, he has three requests that he passes on to his son: (1) avenge my death by killing Claudius, (2) honor your mother, and (3) remember me. Without the request moment that’s set into motion by the ghost, there’s no dramatic tension and no play. That request is the play’s dramatic core, and, for Hamlet, the central problem. Here are the ghost’s words:

If thou has nature in thee, bear it not;

Let not the royal bed of Denmark be

A couch for luxury and damned incest.

But, howsoever thou pursuest this act,

Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive

Against thy mother aught: leave her to heaven

And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge,

To prick and sting her. Fare thee well at once!

The glow-worm shows the matin to be near,

And ’gins to pale his uneffectual fire:

Adieu, adieu! Hamlet, remember me.

This request puts Hamlet into a corner: the request is a huge one involving murder—and regicide—but Hamlet can’t decide whether he’s obliged to fulfill it and strong enough in will to honor it. Some of us may not be capable of murder even for a good cause. What starts out the play also ends it: with his dying breath, Hamlet gasps out a last request to Horatio: If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, / Absent thee from felicity awhile, / And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, / To tell my story. It’s as if requests animate the play from start to finish and therefore have a second and third life: the first one sets others into motion, like a repetition compulsion of four words: Do what I ask. In the world of the play, one request engenders another, and another.

Once you notice request moments as sparkplugs to Shakespearean drama, they seem to crop up everywhere. In King Lear, act one, scene one, Lear makes the preposterous request to his daughters that they should, or must, tell him how much they love him. This request frames the condition—of parceling out his kingdom to them. As he says, Tell me, my daughters,— / Since now we will divest us both of rule, / Interest of territory, cares of state,— / Which of you shall we say doth love us most? / … Goneril, / Our eldest-born, speak first. Cordelia, of course, regards her father’s request as ridiculous, and she refuses to follow his instructions. And, as a consequence, we have the drama of a refusal that sets all the dramatic machinery into motion.

Measure for Measure begins with a request, from the Duke to Angelo. Sophocles’ Oedipus the King begins with an urgent plea from the citizens of Thebes to Oedipus: please lift the plague that’s destroying the city. There are many, many other request moments in Shakespeare and in dramatic literature generally, too many to count. What is it about these requests that set stories with a particular urgency into motion?

Many of our models for writing and for thinking about plot and plot construction go back to common questions: What does this character want? Or: What is this character afraid of? According to the conventional wisdom, if we know what the protagonist desires or fears, we know what’s at stake in the story—that is, the goal, what stands to be gained or lost: status, a love object, riches, a particular identity, whatever it may be. Those desires and fears provide us with the emotional logic of the story. This is standard fiction workshop orthodoxy.

Partial truths can quickly turn into rule-of-thumb conventions and then into clichés. Literature doesn’t always work through simple desires and fears because real life doesn’t always work that way. Social life often requires a disguise. Much of the time in our lives, we aren’t doing what we want to do; we’re performing actions that other people want us to do. We’re acting on the basis of a transferred desire, a desire that has been unhoused from its owner and sutured onto us. In this way, we lose ownership over our behavior. Beyond that, we lose control of our lives by trying to fulfill all the requests that others have placed on us. Your spouse or partner wants you to do something small or large; your children want you to do whatever they can think up; your boss has various demands or requests; and God has several commands, and if his commands are sometimes hard to live up to, well, that’s life. The Bible is an inventory of humanity’s failures to do what God has asked. The story of Adam’s fall is the story of how Adam and Eve fail at the first command that God makes of them. And that’s the ur-story, the original story at the beginning of time, that moment, and its subsequent punishment.

If you divide imperatives into three general categories—suggestions, requests, and commands—you’re forced to consider the size and scope of rewards and punishments. Advice or suggestions often function as dramatic preludes, but they typically feel light and inconsequential. The Great Gatsby opens with a remembered piece of advice from Nick Carraway’s father, and this easygoing and almost weightless suggestion starts off the novel: Whenever you feel like criticizing any one … just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had. Okay, fine. Advice can usually be ignored because it involves no obligation on our part to follow it. By its very nature, it’s unenforceable. We may take someone’s advice or not, and no one will pay much attention to what we do one way or the other. In Hamlet, the character of Polonius is famously long-winded and dull. In act one, scene three, he dishes out tiresome advice to his son, Laertes. Neither a borrower nor a lender be, he says, and so on and so on.

At the other end of the spectrum are the orders and commands that presuppose no real choice on our part unless we choose to disobey or violate them at our peril (torture, prison, the firing squad, one of the circles of Hell). Those with great power have the means to enforce what they ask for. But if the enforcer’s power is not absolute, the person who is the object of the request may still have a choice. Suppose in the midst of a pandemic you are asked to wear a mask. This request will not be enforced everywhere. The conditional proof it implies is as follows: Wearing a mask will help to contain the disease and protect you from infection. If you care about other people, you’ll wear it. However, most of the time, you are not commanded to wear a mask, there is no penalty for not wearing one, and the request is not a mere piece of advice. You have some freedom to choose. Your choice, furthermore, may be a reflection on your character, and it may have consequences in the real world. People who don’t like to take orders will claim that their liberty is at stake. (We are not at liberty, however, to drive while drunk or to commit murder. There are limits to what we are free to do when our actions cause harm to others, which complicates the problem of masks.)

Dramatic interest and dramatic structure usually involve a character’s decision to go in one particular direction. That’s a crucial difference: requests contain a certain obligation but also imply a choice on your part, whereas commands assume that you have no choice but to obey. The Ten Commandments are not requests; they’re orders. They’re not the Ten Suggestions. God has issued the order, and you follow it, or else. You’re not supposed to have a better idea about how to behave.

Somewhere between advice and commandment, we find the requests that produce dramatic tension. Typically, they have three components: (1) the request itself, (2) what the enactment of the request will establish or prove, and (3) the time frame.

For example: (1) Please get that dog down the street to stop barking. It’s driving me crazy. (2) If you’re smart, you’ll figure out a way to do it. (3) Please do it now; I’m going nuts.

Another example: (1) Kill King Duncan and fulfill your dream and mine. (2) If you’re a real man and want to enact your ambitions, you’ll do it. (3) It must be done tonight.

A final example: (1) Save the city of Thebes from this terrible plague. (2) We are dying, and you’re the king. Prove your kingship. (3) Do it now.

Because request moments happen in a social world between two or more characters, they often reveal the particular society or subculture in which the characters are living, the nature of obligations in that world, and thus the social contract. In this way, a request may reveal the norms by which people live.

The movie of The Godfather begins with an Italian American undertaker, Bonasera, making a request of Don Vito Corleone. Some men have assaulted Bonasera’s daughter, and the undertaker wants Don Vito to kill these men in retribution. The request illuminates the web of social obligations that the two men and their families inhabit, and Don Vito refuses the request as out of proportion and unjust. The request has to be scaled down, or the Godfather won’t give the order. Also, because Don Vito has been offended by Bonasera’s behavior, there’s a condition: Bonasera must agree to be Don Vito Corleone’s friend. Don Vito tells the undertaker that he himself may have a request someday—that is, as I’ve noted, requests are by nature often reciprocal by giving birth to other requests. (He does in fact have such a request, eventually: Bonasera must make the body of Don Vito’s older son presentable in his casket, after the son has been shot up on the causeway.) The Godfather finally agrees to the scaled-down request. He says magnanimously to Bonasera, Accept this justice as a gift on my daughter’s wedding day. For the reader or viewer of The Godfather, the request shows us the inner workings, the dynamics, of this complex social structure, the family and its related criminal organization.

What if someone with power over you asks you to perform an unethical action? That’s part of Hamlet’s problem, and Macbeth’s, but also Don Vito Corleone’s: they’ve all been asked to perform violent acts that may be unjust. What if you say, If you love me, you’ll do what I ask? This statement is a turning point in Raymond Carver’s story Cathedral. The narrator’s wife has befriended a blind man who’s coming to the house tonight for dinner. The narrator’s wife asks her husband to be hospitable to the blind man, with this condition: ‘If you love me,’ she said, ‘you can do this for me. If you don’t love me, okay. But if you had a friend, any friend, and the friend came to visit, I’d make him feel comfortable.’

Request moments function so well in stories because they may reveal power relationships in a social matrix: they show us who’s got the power, and who has little or none, and what people do, or think they can do, when in the grip of such power. Can a particular person resist power? Can Hamlet resist the request that his late father, now a ghost, makes of him? Power sometimes moves in unexpected directions. One is not always the master, and the other is not always the servant.

Until you’re a parent, for example, you may not realize how much power infants actually have, or how much power our children may have over us as they grow up. We always assume that power goes in the other direction, from parents to children, but it’s not always so. Romantic relationships involve a constant shifting of power between one person and another—the power of sex, of attraction, of money, of charm, of love. The stories of request moments reveal the bizarre manner in which power can sometimes displace our best intentions and make us into people we didn’t think we were. But the point is that the revelations don’t arrive on the scene until after the request has been made. First the request, then the